When customers buy product items from various merchants in retails environments, such as retail outlets, shopping centers, stores, and so forth, only a handful of payment methods is available to the customers. Typical examples include credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, checks, and cash. Each one of these payment methods has some drawbacks from cost and/or convenience perspectives. For example, checks and cash transactions are slow and require additional processing and/or handling. All these drawbacks interfere with retail transactions and add some level of dissatisfaction. The credit or debit cards are associated with a bank account of a customer and are usually given to the customer while opening the bank account. Credit cards require substantial processing fees, while debit cards require availability of funds and sometimes involve surcharges as well. Typically, interchange and processing fees for a complete credit/debit card transaction may reach a significant amount.
At the same time, the customer typically visits a number of retails environments. Continuous carrying multiple retail cards (or other security/transactional devices) every time when visiting a retail environment of a merchant is inconvenient for the customer. Using a mobile payment service, the customer may save on processing fees, as well as may be able to pay any time without carrying cash or any credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, or checks.
Additionally, personal digital communication devices, such as smartphones, are evolving rapidly and more and more people prefer using personal digital communication devices for a numerous purposes. One of such purposes is to send messages to other users of personal digital communication devices. Current mobile operators enable sending text, image, or audio massages but such kinds of service are chargeable. Furthermore, sending a file having a big size, e.g. a video file, can be problematic due to restriction of mobile operators as to the maximum size of a file to be sent. Furthermore, current messaging clients offering real-time text transmission over the Internet are supposed for a certain operation system. However, communication between users having different operation systems may face problems.
Moreover, although available mobile operators or messaging clients (for example, Snapchat, Skype, WhatsApp Messenger) solve the problem of sending various types of messages, they do not provide any means for performing transactions between users. The users need to use a separate software or browser-based client for making payments. Additionally, the users may have to pay a transfer fee for each payment.